The fact is, cloud storage is one of those inevitable developments that will continue to gain momentum even as high-profile disruptions mount. Salesforce.com EC3 and Google have had several major snafus over the past few years, yet they're still here. And how many times has your local area network gone down this year? I'll bet no one in IT was talking about scrapping the whole thing.

Here's a prediction for you: Cloud computing will continue to thrive simply because the economics are so appealing. At the same time, its ability to integrate into existing data infrastructures is improving.

Couple that move with the news that the Storage Networking Industry Association has launched a Cloud Storage Initiative aimed at standardizing the disparate formats that are currently circulating on the cloud, and it becomes clear that the industry is intent on providing an open environment in which services can interoperate across multiple platforms. How successful they will be depends on industry support, but momentum is at least moving in the right direction, with the goal being nothing less than a universal Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) that stretches across all cloud environments.

In that vein then, the cloud is nothing new. If security is increased substantially because data is stored locally, then how much more secure would it be to remove it off the digital tier altogether? Only a few of you can probably remember the paper days.

Oops, forgot -- paper can burn. Better chisel all your data onto stone.

via itbusinessedge